


Televention

by orphan_account



Category: Deadwood, Hawaii Five-0 (2010), QI - Fandom
Genre: Drama, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-07
Updated: 2013-10-07
Packaged: 2017-12-28 15:59:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/993809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>SO - back before I ever found the AO3 OR saw TW or POI or anything, I wrote this actual play - which was put on in an actual theatre with professional actors etc etc - as a personal exploration of what great TV can do for a person. In it, the playwright - CLARE - organises a performance in which she is played by a beautiful actress, who is magically visited through the television by TRIXIE from Deadwood, her favourite show. But then STEVE McGarrett comes through too - sort of with Danno, and then so does Stephen FRY who is her hero. Then the beautiful actress gets annoyed with playing a lonely shut-in fantasist (as she sees it) and rebels - and there is also trouble with the replacement MUSICIAN that CLARE has hired to play the ukulele. </p><p>I don't know that ANYONE will read it on here, as it is only tangentially fan-fiction in a way - and it takes a while to read etc - but I thought it might be a useful thing to have it up on a public site. And also - I am super proud of it. Unlike MY slightly dodgy fanfics, which are secret from everyone I know, and which are written for my own amusement and the amusement of like-minded peeps :) , this ended up being a serious go at literature. I am gifting it to my fave writer ATM.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Televention

**Author's Note:**

  * For [astolat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/astolat/gifts).



Televention: A NEW COMEDY OF MANNERS

The play was first performed at the King St Theatre in Newtown in September 2012

The song “The Cruel War” can be found in the book Hal Leonard Paperback Songs: International Folksongs. The other songs are original and charts are available on request - email textmonkey2002@yahoo.com - except that Steve’s song is an hommage to “Aloha Steve and Danno” by Radio Birdman, which itself contains most of the original Hawaii 5-0 theme by Morton Stevens.

Copyright Clare Heuston 2013 Sydney (v4.0)

CHARACTERS:  
A MUSICIAN: A skeezy-looking villain in a horrid t-shirt who sings beautifully and plays guitar or tenor uke.  
CLARE: a very big girl of 40.  
ALEX JOHANNESSEN: a lovely actress, some very vague points of similarity to CLARE. Can do the Harbour Bridge over a Pilates Ball. Can sing.  
STEVE McGARRETT: from (new) Hawaii-5-0, looks very roughly like Alex O’Loughlin, able to do a push-up with his feet elevated on a Pilates ball. Bit of singing.  
DANNY (Dano) WILLIAMS: a GI Joe or Ken doll. Literally. Made of plastic. Ideally he should have an outfit that includes a pale shirt and a dark tie.  
TRIXIE: the whore of Deadwood. Should look very vaguely like Paula Malcolmson. Can sing.  
FRY: a whore-god of the ether. Ideally he will be able to do Stephen Fry’s voice and will look a tiny bit like Fry. However it could work if he is just someone generally authoritative and about 48 (for the stage anyway) with an utterly brilliant more or less RP voice. 

SCENE 1  
[Clare’s flat at night. The TV - although it is just a box - is visibly on. The idea of the light is a lit-by-TV flicker. The TV should be silhouetted and has a DVD player on top; both are plugged in to a just visible power-board. There should be a dark space a metre wide between the audience’s feet and the lit stage. On top of the DVD player there are two silver candlesticks.  
Next to the big armchair is a little wooden chair. Near the armchair is a bookshelf with novels, DVDs and the odd household god, a teacup, a bottle of Galliano, etc. There is a second lighter armchair next to the telly. S.R. to the side there is band area with a keyboard and ukuleles, plus an amp and a plugged-in mic on a stand.  
CLARE enters and checks setup, puts remote on the table and the glasses on the chair.  
The TV sound comes up with the sound of channels changing randomly, fragments of QI, Hawaii 5-0, Deadwood fade to CLARE playing when you’re alone, and finally a hideous ad for roller blinds.]  
VO1FRY: [the STEVE and FRY actors, alternating to a mic backstage] Looking for ways to protect your home from intruders?  
TRIX and ALEX, harmony: “CRIIIIIIIM - PROOF!”  
VO2STEVE: “See: with Crimproof roller shutters, your windows are crim-proof!  
TRIX and ALEX, harmony: “CRIIIIIIIM - PROOF!”  
VO1FRY: With other brands, you just can’t be sure -  
VO2STEVE: Look - they are in!  
TRIX and ALEX, harmony: “CRIIIIIIIM - PROOF!”  
VO1FRY: But with Crimproof, no matter what this guy tries, he isn’t going anywhere except jail! Wait - [out of character] how is he -?  
VO2STEVE: What’s he trying now? [out of character] Oh my god, he is like - going transparent!” [girls scream. Whole tone scale. Crackling.]  
MUSICIAN jumps onto the set thru the TV frame. He looks around anxiously. CLARE is still playing his cue. No one is looking! Great. He cases the joint. On top of the TV are two small silver candlesticks. He feels the weight and then pockets one. Then:  
CLARE: [to the MUSICIAN] Hi, are you the guy Gus sent?  
MUSICIAN: [whatever you say] Yes.  
CLARE: You got here almost on time from the Coast! That’s amazing!  
MUSICIAN: Yeah… I came straight here.  
CLARE: You didn’t bring your own instrument then? I have a tenor and a soprano, so we should be OK.  
MUSICIAN: Tenor - sax? [steps back towards telly - that won’t be good]  
CLARE: [producing it] Ukulele. That’s good for you isn’t it?  
MUSICIAN: Tenor ukulele. So same as the top four strings of a guitar yeh?  
CLARE: [bit suspicious] Yes. Gus did brief you, didn’t he? He had a family emergency , he said.  
MUSICIAN: Yeah, we didn’t get to talk long. So: I’ll get paid for this?  
CLARE: Yes. Eventually.  
MUSICIAN: So where is the score?  
CLARE: All set up.  
MUSICIAN: This is the first number?  
CLARE: It’s normally his solo, you know - “Near Waikiki” - but I can strum along to back you up a bit if you want.  
MUSICIAN: I think I know it…  
CLARE: [lights come up on stage] Oops. You’re on. They are about to start.  
MUSICIAN: Jesus Christ.  
CLARE: Excuse me! Just be careful of your language will you? That’s a live mic.  
MUSICIAN: [sings and plays tenor uke]

Oh come with me to Diamond Bay  
Near Old Waikiki-town,  
You’ll have a night that’s wild and gay  
And wipe away your frown!  
You never know who you might meet –  
A roughneck or a young aesthete!  
Come take my hand, upon the strand  
Near Waikiki. 

The sands are blacker than the skies  
Near Old Waikiki-town,  
The sea is brighter than your eyes,  
When the golden moon shines down,  
The night is warm and smells of love:  
We’ll go together, hand in glove,  
Come go with me, beside the sea  
Near Waikiki.

SCENE 2  
[ALEX-as-Clare comes out onto the set and picks up the remote, and flicks quietly around channels. She sticks in the Deadwood DVD from the box set. It is a scene of TRIXIE and Sol. She settles in the armchair. Crackling sound.]  
TRIXIE: [coming out through the TV frame] Are you asleep?  
ALEX: Trixie: is that you?  
TRIXIE: Damn right. How are you doing? You look real good up close!  
ALEX: I’m fine! How did you do that?  
TRIXIE: What’s it to you? Didn’t scare you did I?  
ALEX: I’m not scared! Though I probably should be- it is just so nice to see you! [she goes to kiss TRIXIE hello] How did you - ?  
TRIXIE: I don’t really understand how it happens, but with the Televisions - if their folks look at them long enough and hard enough, sometimes something happens to the little piece of glass.  
ALEX: The screen.  
TRIXIE: Anyways it gets thin. And then if we want to we can come through - but only sometimes.  
ALEX: Is this the first time you have tried to - come through?  
TRIXIE: It’s the first time it’s worked here, anyway - I tried one other time but there was some kind of blockade. I’ve heard you talking to the TV sometimes, and I thought, why not slip out for an hour and pay her a visit? Some of us learn to see out a bit, and I have looked into your room quite a few times, and seen the fancy bottle back there and thought, I’d like a taste of that…  
ALEX: I regret to say the actual stuff got drunk ages ago - I kept the bottle because it was pretty. That is just coloured water in it, I wouldn’t drink it.  
TRIXIE: Oh horseshit. Well - no harm done. It is pleasant here.  
ALEX: It’s quiet anyway.  
TRIXIE: And Clare - you live here all on your lonesome?  
ALEX: Yes. It’s a good size for one person. Trix, you seem so relaxed - in your show just now, things were pretty tense!  
TRIXIE: Was Al picking on my poor man? I think the Sheriff was off on a tear, wasn’t he?  
ALEX: It looks like it was so awful on the frontier. Unbelievably dirty, and unbelievably violent, for a start.  
TRIXIE: Damn right, it was terrifying while them sons of bitches were still making up our stories for us.  
ALEX: What’s it like living in Deadwood now there are no new episodes being made?  
TRIXIE: Oh, it’s much easier these days! We still go through all the murders and plots, because in all the different places folks are still watching different episodes, but at least we all know Al gets well from his illness, and I end up living with Sol now, so it ain’t so terrible as it was at first. You know, even Seth and Mrs Bullock are OK. We were all so mournful then, when the thing happened.  
ALEX: When their little boy got kicked by the horse.  
TRIXIE: There ain’t many little ones in the territory – every child seems to be the apple of everybody’s eye.  
ALEX: You didn’t grow up out West, did you?  
TRIXIE: Me? No. They said I was born in Georgia, but I got dragged up all over.  
ALEX: What did your parents do?  
TRIXIE: Oh all kinds of things. Were your parents good people?  
ALEX: Yes, they were nice. They were funny. They were very young - it seems to me now as if we were more or less kids together, the three of us. We had the same tastes.  
TRIXIE: In what?  
ALEX: OK - my dad liked to pretend he was a bit of a chef - and sometimes he would make a big bowl of meringue - egg whites, and you whip them up with sugar and vinegar and vanilla essence until they are glossy and creamy, and then you are meant to cook this massive lot of it up and it becomes a dessert called a pavlova. But instead, he would make it, and the two of us would sit down with spoons and eat it raw in front of the telly.  
TRIXIE: So they watched the Television with you? Is that why you like it so much, because it is from your childhood?  
ALEX: Maybe. We all liked the same shows: Dr Who and Countdown and Get Smart and F-Troop… but there was a lot of discussion about whether or not TV rots children’s brains – like computer games do now.  
TRIXIE: Paula - my actor - she is afraid of her little ones’ brains getting rotted.  
ALEX: Yes, my mum and dad used to have big debates about it back then. I remember them deciding at some point that the SHOWS were fine but that they should draw the mental hygiene line at ads. So right there, Dad set the dial on our little blue TV to the public broadcaster - it doesn’t have ads - and then pulled the plastic bit off with pliers, so that there was only a short metal rod sticking out which we couldn’t turn with our fingers.  
TRIXIE: So no-one could change the goddamn ‘channel’!  
ALEX: Exactly! That was the theory, but the very next Saturday morning, me and Dad found out he could use the pliers to turn the little rod: we were both panicking because we realised we were about to miss “Lance Link, Secret Chimp”.  
TRIXIE: It sounds like you all were very happy together.  
ALEX: We were when I was little, and even, later on - I was safe and well-fed and everything.  
TRIXIE: But…  
ALEX: I don’t know. The tone changed. Like after dinner most nights - I would flee the kitchen and start watching TV. When the dishes stopped clattering I would know they were coming into the lounge room to do this routine.  
They would stand around watching whatever I was watching in silence for a bit. Then just as I was starting to hope that they were going to sit down themselves and watch WITH me, Dad would go:  
“You know while you are watching this, your face has gone completely slack right? You look brain-dead.”  
Next there would be a long silence, during which I would be praying that the cat would vomit up a hairball in the hall or something - anything, if it would make them go away.  
Then Mum would start in on the show. “I don’t know how you can bear to watch this rubbish. A minute ago these guys were doing karate and rolling around on a mat, then they seemed to be practicing completely unnecessary handbrake turns, and now this one is kissing a witness - what JOB is it that these fellows are supposed to be doing?”  
Then Dad would finish it off.  
“You know kiddo, the state of your room is pretty dire. You could be tidying it up right now instead of wasting your time.” And then I would just give up and go off by myself.  
TRIXIE: Why were your things untidy? How old were you?  
ALEX: Oh twelve or thirteen. Just a kid.  
TRIXIE: Right. Them hoople-heads my parents sold me to a dealer when I was twelve. I guess I missed out on them telling me off for a lot of things.  
ALEX: It sounds like our experiences of childhood diverged at a key point.  
TRIXIE: You got that right.  
ALEX: I think that routine may have laid a curse on me in fact: it somehow meant that I would forever long to watch TV for about 38 hours a week. The more they dissed the shows I liked, the more I wanted to just sit and watch by myself.  
TRIXIE: By yourself.  
ALEX: I probably had about six favourite shows, but the one I was thinking of before was The Professionals. It was a UK version of Starsky and Hutch, but with a cool Brit-fascist edge. It was about these two operatives – one an ex-mercenary and one an ex-cop. They were always chasing girls – they liked to go on double-dates – but they did a lot of looking lovingly at each other.  
TRIXIE: Right.  
ALEX: There was lots of joshing around and often a bit of wrestling and punching each other – [TRIXIE nods] - and then at the end they would save each other’s lives, usually by shooting a bad guy who was sneaking up on the other one around a corner. Then there would be a lot of panting, and saying things like “Mate, I think that’s 3-1 now” and “Don’t worry about it, you would have done the same for me”.  
TRIXIE: You sound like you thought it was pretty god-damn stupid yourself.  
ALEX: Maybe I did – sort of stupid but RIVETING as well. I have probably spent months of my life watching these shows.  
TRIXIE: Why?  
ALEX: Because [looking for an answer and finding a rationalisation] - I guess it is fun watching tough, un-soppy guys get very intense and sentimental, when one gets tied up by the bad guys and the other one goes, “NO Chief, I don’t care what the rules are, if you didn’t want to go and rescue him you shouldn’t have told me where he was!”  
TRIXIE: So they were idiots.  
ALEX: Not idiots exactly. I guess – I guess we all wish we had a super tough friend who would come rushing in and kick all the mean guys in the knackers and go “hang on man, I got you,” and act as if us having a split lip was the worst thing that ever happened in the history of the universe. 

SCENE 3  
[Enter STEVE in a dashing roll out of the TV.]  
STEVE: Hey!  
ALEX: Hi!  
STEVE: Yeah, hi! - [puzzled by her appearance] you are Clare, yeah? [security concerns] You know that screen is getting SO thin - like - we have NEVER come through easier than that. You need to be really careful - I think anyone could come through if it was on, even like - a bad guy. You should never leave it on while you are out of the room.  
ALEX: Wow. But - Steve - I wasn’t even watching your show just now.  
STEVE: I think your machine is taping it - and something else on whatever “Channel 2” is maybe? While you were watching a DVD?  
ALEX: Yes…. [indicates Trixie]  
STEVE: Hey – [to Trixie, friendly and impressed] I know who you are! You are Trixie the Whore!  
TRIXIE: Who the fuck are you?  
STEVE: Sorry - Steve McGarrett. Hawaii 5-0.  
TRIXIE: What kind of a show is that?  
STEVE: [To CLARE, ALEX, MUSICIAN, over music starting] Help me out here, yeah? [sings to “tune” of Radio Birdman’s “Aloha Steve and Danno”, in Em]

Dad was a detective in the HPD: he was as good as it gets  
Post 9-11 - our Island State - foreign and domestic threats  
I got the call from the Governor: she wanted something new  
An elite crime-fighting team: an incorruptible crew:

OTHERS SING: Nana nana na na etc [H 5-0 theme]

STEVE:  
I knew I needed a man I could trust, and Chin Ho stepped forward  
Young Kono showed us her moves: we had the right woman on board  
Next we went to the HPD for an experienced guy:  
Danny Williams was the man they sent: a Jersey cop in Hawaii!

OTHERS SING: Nana nana na na etc 

TRIXIE: All right then.  
ALEX: It is a pretty awesome show.  
STEVE: Thanks. And - ma’am - I meant no disrespect before. It says “Trixie the Whore” on your bank account, right?  
TRIXIE: I did tell the widow to put that, didn’t I.  
STEVE: So - let me get this right - when you are watching my show, are you just waiting and waiting for Dano to get kidnapped and tortured so I can go rescue him and start saying “I got you man” and all that stuff?  
ALEX: Surely YOU are more likely to get kidnapped and tortured… you seem to be more the super buff hero type who ends up with his arms tied over his head.  
STEVE: I was tied up and tortured already – don’t you remember? With a cattle prod, in North Korea that time?  
ALEX: Sorry, I forgot for a minute. That was a weird episode. And they actually left your shirt on with your arms tied over your head – which I have never seen done before. But - you could still see that you were in outstanding shape.  
STEVE: Danny works out pretty hard too you know.  
TRIXIE: Danny from the - HPD.  
STEVE: [no self-consciousness] Well, he WAS with the Honolulu PD for about two weeks, till we partnered up. [TRIXIE catches ALEX’s eye – she knows what this guy is doing here.] Yeah, since he came to the islands, he has been doing a lot of beach running - and he does most of it on the soft sand. You have to have less than ten per cent body fat to have a visible six-pack, and his is pretty crisp.  
ALEX: Hey – your accent is a bit different.  
STEVE: Yeah, that's because Alex O’Loughlin, my actor, he is really Australian and so he overdoes the voice here and there. Also - while we are playing spot-the-difference - I am not as handsome as Alex. He is just ridiculously good-looking. He has huge eyes.  
ALEX: It is nearly always that way - that actors are handsomer but less attractive than their characters.  
STEVE: Ha! It’s true of Danny and Scott anyway. Hang on – Danny says – [he pulls Danny, who is apparently the size of a Ken Doll, from out of his pocket and stands him up on his hand near his ear] Yeah – he says Scott is way handsomer than he is, too.  
ALEX: I feel a bit confused – I know Dano is shorter than you, but he seems much, much smaller right now.  
STEVE: He came through from further away – it’s about relative distances, don’t worry about it. Hey [to Dano] show them your 6-pack! [they stand up to look]  
ALEX: Most impressive, very cut, and they look rock-hard. [They are after all made of plastic.] Congratulations Dano.  
STEVE: [listening] He says thanks, and that you should try an astringent for your pores, because they look a bit out of control.  
ALEX: [arrested motion while dropping back into chair] OK…  
TRIXIE: I dunno if you ought to make remarks about other folks’ skin when yours only looks perfect because you are 6 inches tall.  
STEVE: [listens] He says please don’t start with the short jokes. [listens, self-deprecating half-laugh] And he says that one of the reasons he likes me is that I don’t go on and on about his stature. He says that when I’m not pistol-whipping guys I have very good manners. [He seats Dano on top of the TV next to him.]  
TRIXIE: I wouldn’t pat myself on the back too hard for my nice manners if I was you. Is anyone else thirsty?  
ALEX: I should have beers in the kitchen.  
STEVE: That would be great. Coming through makes you really really thirsty.  
TRIXIE: Is that what it is? Don’t you stir, Clare, Steve only just got here. I will go fetch some and maybe wash my face too.

SCENE 4  
ALEX: So – [both settle] I guess the obvious question to ask, while I have you to myself more or less - are you two really an item?  
STEVE: Me - and Dan you mean?  
ALEX: Of course.  
STEVE: Like, have me and Dan ever made out?  
ALEX: Or, you know, whatever. Or nearly.  
STEVE: You look like you want me to say yes.  
ALEX: No no, just be honest. Do you think Dan fancies you?  
STEVE: He was married you know.  
ALEX: Yeah ok, that sounded super gay.  
STEVE: Okay. Here you go. [takes off shirt] Now ask me if Danny fancies me.  
ALEX: Oh my Lord. What’s your point? That anyone who has ever seen you with your shirt off fancies you a bit?  
STEVE: [shrugs] And vice-versa [sic] probably – he is a lively guy, you know. He’s energetic.  
ALEX: Your tattoos are awful by the way – they are kind of blurry and bad.  
STEVE: Yeah, they aren’t “Skin Art”, they are SEAL tatts so that when your shark-gnawed remains are hauled aboard by the salvage team they can identify you and send the telegram to your mom.  
ALEX: [calling him on this bit of grandstanding] Except your mum died in a car accident years ago.  
STEVE: Dude, do you even watch our show?  
ALEX: Oh, yep, sorry. She was really murdered by Wo Fat’s brother or cousin who was also his caddy – is that right?  
STEVE: You are SO FAR behind here! But anyway - I wanna make sure I have this right - you are watching our prime time show, which is made by a mainstream American Network, completely ignoring the story, in the hope that sooner or later, despite both of us chasing successfully after various hot girls, and me kind of being with Lt Rollins, and me and Danny constantly checking out the caboose of that FBI girl temporarily attached to the 5-0 who was secretly in love with me -  
ALEX: Except that she was actually dating the forensic science guy!  
STEVE: Yeh whatever [as if] – that after all this hetero action, one day me and Dano are going to get into a - thing and there will be a big passionate scene, and we will be rubbing our washboard abs together. [listens momentarily to Dano, remonstrating] Yeah, that’s what I am saying man, it is highly unlikely, don’t freak out.  
ALEX: Nooooo. I mean not really. [so, yes. here come excuses] It is a pretty show! There are lots of beaches and hibiscuses and Grace Park is a terrible actor and it’s funny!  
STEVE: It’s not THAT funny. I mean, Danny is funny, but it isn’t - what is your idea of a really funny show?  
ALEX: What is that show with Liz Lemon?  
CLARE: 30Rock.  
STEVE: Exactly! Thanks! [looks, sotto voce, to ALEX] That lady is kind of dressed as you. She is wearing an almost identical outfit.  
ALEX: [glasses off] Wrong way round.  
STEVE: How do you mean?  
ALEX: That’s the real Clare, over there.  
STEVE: What, on keys?  
CLARE: Alex!! [She just got outed!]  
STEVE: OK! [to DANO] Now THAT makes sense.  
ALEX: It’s all right. [As CLARE again, glasses on, to STEVE, chagrin] OK, fair enough. The chances of me ever seeing the promised spectacle of you two making out are slim to none.  
STEVE: How is it “promised”?  
ALEX: [emphatic um, not a hesitation] Umm, how many times an episode is there a remark about you two being like a married couple? [STEVE does an anh! concession gesture] It reminds me of when I first saw Smallville - and I rang up my gay friend who grew up in the country and I said, “Oh my god have you ever seen Smallville? I bet gay kids in the country are watching it with bated breath.” And he said, “Yeah I think they are watching Queer as Folk actually”.  
STEVE: Ha! Never seen that, but I can imagine. Well, if that is the kind of stuff you like – like a hardcore realist thing, where the story is completely mad and depressing, and everyone is all sexy and drugged up and naked and they show EVerything right there in your living room – why don’t you just watch those HBO shows instead?

SCENE 5  
TRIXIE: [walking on briskly with three beers in bottles] She watches those HBO shows AS WELL.  
STEVE: Trixie! Good job. [holds out his hand for a beer]  
TRIXIE: [withholding it momentarily] I had a think about it, and I reckoned I could live without being introduced to the room as a whore, especially by a puffed-up sailor boy who can’t even close the deal with a feller he has been flirting with for two years. [ALEX laughs] And now I am thinking, from that point of view, any show where anyone managed to get their cock out of their pants to take a piss would look like “hardcore realism” to you, what with your being stuck forever in Act 1 of The History of Longing Looks, where you will remain, whilesoever you and your little friend there continue to take orders from a bunch of querulous idiots over at CBS. Also technically: [finally hands STEVE his beer, I am] more of a bookkeeper now.  
STEVE: How in the name of all that’s holy am I “puffed up” Trixie?  
TRIXIE: Oh come on. I am not saying you are fat exactly, but have you seen my Jew? Thirty-five years old and he’s as wiry as boy. [hands ALEX her beer, to STEVE] You can put your shirt back on, everyone has seen what you’re selling.  
STEVE: Yes Ma’am. [arrested motion while pulling on his t-shirt] I suddenly remembered seeing your Sheriff building the hardware store overnight in his jeans – now that was an impressively low body fat percentage right there.  
ALEX: I remember seeing that too. Timothy Olyphant. What a spectacle. [all three nod.]  
TRIXIE: The Sheriff is a beautiful creature.  
ALEX: [raises ‘PAUSE’ finger] For the sake of accuracy - his character wasn’t actually Sheriff of Deadwood back then in the ep where he built the store.  
TRIXIE: [to ALEX] Right. How come you have time to watch all these shows so careful like? Don’t you work?  
ALEX: Of course I work! I am a bit of a home body though. – [idiot voice] I love me stories.  
TRIXIE: What of your story? We know you’ve got an eye for the gentlemen – so – where’s your feller, Clare?  
ALEX: Oh MY GOD. [in front of STEVE! bit appalled] No feller, Trix.  
TRIXIE: Admittedly, nearly every one of them is an evil-minded cocksucker or a hypocrite who feels free to call any girl a whore –  
STEVE: [goaded] Only girls who are FAMOUS WHORES…  
TRIXIE: - but you have to get lonely sometime. So come on, why no feller?  
STEVE: Or do youuuuu have a special best friend of your very own?  
ALEX: No Steve, IIIIII don’t.  
TRIXIE: Then where is Mr Clare? You can’t just set around here by yourself all the time.  
ALEX: I don’t sit around here ALL the time! And people come over.  
STEVE: But no partner. Seriously, you must be lonely.  
ALEX: Why MUST I be?! Not all of us need to be standing in effigy on top of a wedding cake next to a little plastic man in a tux!  
STEVE: I explained about that. [“shut-up” look, re DANO]  
TRIXIE: Who said anything about weddings? I just wanted to know whether your man was out there somewhere. Ain’t you ever been someone’s girl?  
ALEX: Oh good grief! Back when I was younger, sure!  
STEVE: Don’t you miss it? I’d go crazy I think.  
TRIXIE: How long since…?  
ALEX: Oh holy Mary. This evening went horribly wrong awfully fast.

SCENE 6  
FRY: [voice over only] I see you are under attack and I have sent my voice to assist you.  
ALEX: Is that - ?  
FRY: It is I, Stephen Fry.  
CLARE: [on her feet] Wow!  
TRIXIE: [to STEVE] Why can’t we see him? Is he off the Radio?  
FRY: Dear Lady, do not be alarmed. You and I might be described by ungenerous persons as two of a kind. While you were the supervising regulatrix of the Gem Saloon for several years, I have gradually become a sort of diffuse Whore-God of the ether, narrating half of my experiences in micro-essays which I post to anyone who is interested at breakfast-, morning-tea-, lunch-, afternoon-tea-, dinner- and supper-times.  
TRIXIE: You seem to eat plenty.  
FRY: In fact, small, regular healthy meals and lots of enthusiastic exercise were two of the pillars of my transformative weight-loss a few years ago. I am like a new man.  
TRIXIE: And who reads about your experiences?  
ALEX: He has four and a half million followers on Twitter!  
TRIXIE: So many people! but, [to be fair] even more people would watch Steve’s show on their Televisions than would read the little essays. [to FRY] Am I right?  
FRY: You are, I think. Many more people would have “Hawaii 5-0”on in their homes than read my tweets. However, perhaps an incomplete list will make the scale of my media-whoring clearer to you. – I am the voice of all seven Harry Potter novels if you buy them as audiobooks, I have a long history of comic collaboration with the actor you associate with Gregory House, I have starred in several excellent motion pictures, I have made a great many documentaries, written several novels and an autobiography, I host a long-running quiz programme for the BBC, and I had a recurring role as Booth’s psychologist on the American action-drama series “Bones”.  
TRIXIE: So you are – really – an actor?  
FRY: I am an industry and we are getting off the point.  
ALEX: I was quite happy off the point.  
FRY: I think you should steel yourself a bit young lady. You are allowed to be interested in what you are interested in you know.  
STEVE: I wish you would appear, Mr Fry. It is weird not having someone to look at and you seem pretty great.  
ALEX: Yes! Please come forth, Fry.  
FRY: Could you sing the Summoning Song to help me appear? I can’t see a place to come through.  
STEVE: What is the Summoning Song?

SCENE 7  
ALEX: Oh you’ll pick it up. OK. [CLARE starts to play. This song should be just a little bit scary, because it is like a Hillsong invocation of the Holy Spirit. ALEX-as-Clare sings matter-of-factly but clearly expecting a material result:]

ALEX: I – ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay ne-ed you to come to me,  
I - ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay wa-ant you here,  
I – ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay am calling to you-oo-oo,  
My hero and my darling and my dear.

[After the first verse the MUSICIAN saunters across the stage as he sings. The actors like it but CLARE is rather annoyed.]

TRIXIE: [reggae solo] Oh oh oh oh -  
ALEX, TRIXIE, STEVE:  
We – ee-ee-ee-ee-ee are feeling so all-alone,  
We – ee-ee-ee-ee-ee are starting to cry-ee,  
We – ee-ee-ee-ee-ee are longing to see you now,  
Come among us here, dear Mr Fry. 

[The MUSICIAN provides fancy, artistic vocal fills for the next verse: CLARE disapproves but is distracted: meanwhile he steals the other candlestick.]

STEVE: [solo] oh-oh-oh-oh!  
STEVE, ALEX, TRIXIE:  
Whe -e-e-e-e-e-en I’m feeling so sad and blue,  
Whe - e-e-e-e-e-en the world makes me sigh,  
Whe -e-e-e-e-e-en I just don’t know what to do,

[The MUSICIAN is returning to the band.]

It’s then I need you here dear Mr Fry,  
Be beside us here, dear Mr Fry,

ALEX, TRIX, STEVE: [invocation, hands up]  
Come and walk among us Mr Fry. 

CLARE: [To MUSICIAN] What was all that about?  
MUSICIAN: What’s your problem? That was good!

SCENE 8  
FRY: [off] Now I am all flustered – I should have asked you to wait a few minutes! I was changing after the taping and I am in my dressing gown!  
ALEX: I am in my stretchy TV top, it’s fine!  
FRY: Oops! [enters from kitchen, splendid dressing gown] All right then. Hello, hello [handshakes, rather in the manner of the queen - not obnoxious in the slightest but with an appropriate air of doing them all a favour. Not MUSICIAN or CLARE] Is there another chair? [they are all up and looking around: they are one short.] I tell you what, we have these Swiss Balls for people to sit on in the dressing rooms, and I think a few rolled through after me into your kitchen. [to ALEX] Let’s get them brought out, shall we?  
ALEX: Sure!  
STEVE: And Clare - Dan wants to call his daughter. Is there a phone out the back?  
ALEX: Yep, I’ll get that organised.  
FRY: [to other two, while she is going out] They are terrific for your posture and they will brighten up the place. Now: you two seem to have come through to - ? [STEVE shakes his head, eyes toward CLARE] Ah.  
TRIXIE: What? [STEVE repressive gesture]  
FRY: Right. We could turn that OFF, couldn’t we? [STEVE turns off the telly at last.]  
MUSICIAN: Oh. [escape route cut off]  
STEVE: Problem?  
MUSICIAN: No, sorry, all good.

SCENE 9  
[ALEX rolls out four Pilates balls.]  
FRY: Here we go! [he picks up and tosses a bouncy ball to ALEX] Clare. [to] Trixie. Is your given name Beatrice then? [she shrugs politely, she can’t remember anyone calling her anything like that] And Steve. [who immediately starts bouncing boyishly on his ball] They are rather jolly aren’t they?  
STEVE: This is nuts! I forgot about these things. Thanks man.  
ALEX: [interested] All right then, tell me: what am I interested in?  
FRY: Well, for one thing, you seem to be quite interested in Romance.  
ALEX and TRIXIE: Really?  
FRY: Why else do you watch his (you must just excuse me for a moment, Steve) utterly preposterous programme, with its splendid decor and theme music and ASinine plots and its ridiculous beard-women? Admittedly, those episodes where Danny simpers at some young lady seem slightly less ridiculous than the ones where you [to STEVE] earnestly whip up some sort of pretence of interest in that Navy lass, who is obligingly absent almost ALL the time. Considered as an attempt at a story about adult humans of normal intelligence, the whole thing is quite ridiculous, but read across the grain as a Romance it is all rather charming of course.  
STEVE: [dubious] I have never thought of fighting terror and organised crime as charming, exactly.  
FRY: It is the very stalled-ness of the central relationship that appeals to Clare here, Trixie. These two splendid young men do everything together, they are aware of each other’s every thought, they hardly take their eyes off each other - and yet they never have to resolve anything, or give up anything, or risk the trials of buying a bedroom floor-rug together or deciding who will do the washing up.  
TRIXIE: But they never get to fuck, do they? So where’s the point?  
FRY: Surely - given your background - you don’t think that the value of a relationship between two people is necessarily determined by how much fucking they do?!  
CLARE: Excuse me - sorry - can we watch the language please?  
FRY: I suppose we can, if you insist - but is anyone who is listening really going to take offence at our perfectly ordinary references to ordinary adult behaviour? Anyone who is still following this conversation is going to be more or less grown up, anyway, aren’t they? I mean - so far we seem to be talking about the appeal of homoerotic narrative. How on earth is that meant to be suitable for, or interesting to children?  
CLARE: Well, maybe not little kids, but seriously, I was about ten when I first noticed I liked stories about really intense friendships between boys. And why wouldn’t teens like listening to us?  
TRIXIE: They like things about whores!  
STEVE: They like me – lots of teens watch “5-0”!  
FRY: Good heavens, all right. But all the teens I hear talking seem to swear like Tourettic sailors. Why should we be censoring ourselves for their benefit?  
CLARE: I’m sorry, but I think a lot of teenagers really don’t like explicit content. I was horribly embarrassed by A Streetcar Named Desire when I was in Year 11 at school.  
FRY: I expect you were – I can hardly imagine a story about a sexy thug who destroys a delightful but slightly deranged fantasist faghag being your cup of tea. Speaking of cups of tea: I am just appallingly thirsty.  
STEVE: It is the coming through, it’s very dehydrating. There’s beer!  
FRY: A beer would be nice!  
ALEX: I’ll get some!  
FRY: No don’t get up again. [to CLARE] Would you mind?  
CLARE: OK.  
ALEX: [to CLARE] Don’t worry, you won’t be missing anything – I AM you, right? [FRY gets it at once. exit CLARE]

SCENE 10  
TRIXIE: Is THAT the real-life Clare?  
STEVE: Yeah.  
FRY: That is our writer.  
ALEX: [as ALEX] Yes: she said she wanted to organise a proper actor to say her lines, but there she is on the stage! Alex Johannessen by the way. [handshakes] It’s a bit off-putting actually. She is the first playwright I have ever heard of who was still sitting on the set once the play started.  
FRY: Tosh. Lots of playwrights put in a lovely little part for themselves. Shakespeare and Moliere did it.  
ALEX: Yeah, but she hasn’t really, not a proper one. If she wanted to be in it, why is she lurking over there?  
FRY: She hasn’t sung at all tonite has she?  
ALEX: No. Why?  
FRY: Can I ask: how did you come to learn the Summoning Song?  
ALEX: She sent me a recording of it, just in case Trixie needed a hand. It was her singing it on the recording, I think.  
FRY: Any good?  
ALEX: She was all right I think.  
FRY: Thank you. Very well. I suppose I will play along for now.  
TRIXIE: You got her thinking about Romance anyway.  
FRY: Yeees.  
TRIXIE: Maybe YOU can make her see how lonely she is!  
FRY: Hmm - I am sure you mean well, but…  
STEVE: She’ll be back any second guys.  
ALEX: I have to stretch. [still out of character, does elegant back bend over Pilates ball] Harbour Bridge!  
TRIXIE: I can sort of balance… [hands and feet off ground, wobbles] Oh shit!  
STEVE: Seriously, check this out. [he does some cool Pilates push-ups with his feet elevated on the ball.]  
TRIXIE: [taunting STEVE for showing off] You can take your shirt back off if you want now. [STEVE does, giving her the eyeball the while, then throws it to FRY, bit of a “see what I did there?”] Okay! [STEVE repeats his feat and finishes off with a hat-trick of clap pushups, and/or a one-armed pushup.]  
GIRLS, FRY: [applause]  
ALEX: [back in character] Ridonculous! How much Pilates do Navy SEALs do, anyway?  
STEVE: Ones that have been shot twice? A whole bunch. 

SCENE 11  
CLARE: [emerging with beers, to ALEX] What did I miss?  
ALEX: Steve doing clap pushups with his feet elevated! It was pretty sick!  
FRY: Indeed.  
TRIXIE: So what were you going to say about Romance, before you got all distracted?  
FRY: [old fashioned look] Well, I suppose it has two elements: an idealisation of sexual love, and suspense, doesn’t it? It starts in the Middle Ages as Courtly Love, with the loyal knight in the noble household in love with, and owing fealty to, the Lady of the place. And she was nearly always married to the Lord, but the knight was permitted this permanent and officially unambitious passion for the Lady, and she could accept his loyalty and admiration and even tolerate sublimated versions of lovemaking –  
ALEX: Like sonnets and things.  
FRY: Well songs or something – the sonnet is a Renaissance thing isn’t it. So - you have this amazing new feeling - this passionate attachment that goes on for years with total propriety achieved at the cost of intense suffering, and always with the looming possibility that one day the lover might be caught unawares and go bonkers and – give the lady a vigorous – [exasperated look at the band] compromising - and then there would be social chaos and disaster –  
ALEX: Camelot.  
FRY: Ya, chaos and civil war there on a national scale, all brought about by the collapse of the love triangle between Guinevere and Arthur and Lancelot. And we are talking about a new LITERARY feeling, it is mediated from the outset.  
STEVE: Because like minstrels was all the media there was.  
FRY: Yes. And from those Arthurian extended prose fictions, through a thousand novels and movies and sitcoms, writers have specialised in keeping their lovers acquainted but apart for two to five volumes - or seasons - until they finally get married and the story is over.  
ALEX: Because no-one wants to read about being married and paying off a gigantic station wagon and taking the kids to their kiddie soccer and the speech pathologist and getting ticked off because your husband never manages to get home from work till both the kids are fed and bathed and dressed for bed.  
FRY: I think your views on real relationships are rather jaundiced.  
ALEX: Not wrong then. [smug]  
FRY: Not WRONG? What is not wrong about being jaundiced? If you are jaundiced you either make changes or DIE, young woman. Jaundice is what you get when you have a dysfunction of the liver, the organ which stores every good thing you need to survive. [realising that he has hoed in pretty hard] Sorry. But yes, I do think you are a bit wrong-headed. Anyway – back to romance –  
TRIXIE: Some people who are more or less married have that romantic feeling though. Like when there is a danger in love, where just having the feeling can put you in danger… and you always thought that all you wanted was to be safe, and then you find yourself walking straight into danger because that feeling draws you. Or you don’t even know why. You just walk towards the good thing.  
FRY: Here’s to you Trixie. [all drink] So you get every possible kind of difficulty being used by writers to gin up the suspense element of their romance, to keep their lovers stuck in Chapter 1 of the History of Longing Looks, as I think Trixie called it –  
ALEX: The boy is a priest –  
FRY: Ballykissangel -  
TRIXIE: The girl is a whore –  
FRY: The fairly ghastly Secret Diary -  
STEVE: Some long-running misunderstanding no-one can talk about –  
FRY: Exactly. Romances take simply forEVer to get to anything like a satisfactory conclusion! But - in this modern world in which we live in, to slightly misquote Paul McCartney, we seem to have a pretty low tolerance for even fictional people who just put up with some ridiculous pretext for never getting what they really want. If they are interested in someone, and some difficult issue needs to be raised – like a not at all respectable past, or a mad wife in a nearby lunatic asylum, or a hidden drastically disfiguring injury, – we expect characters we like to get a firm grip on themselves and say, “I don’t know how you are going to react to this news, but I have a grisly set of lesions on my torso from when I was injured in Iraq and I find them extremely ugly and I am terribly afraid that when I take my shirt off you will scream and run away, and I don’t know how I would ever get over being rejected in that way by you because I love you” and we expect the other person to say, “having had a look at these so-called grisly lesions I think you are mad because they don’t look too bad and they hardly register at all when I am looking at your splendid obliques and I love you too”. Or, indeed, to say, “the lesions ARE truly grisly because they remind me that you fought on the oppressors’ side in a bunch of imperialist wars, and though I accept that you weren’t doing anything wrong by your lights, and though I earnestly hope you will go on to be very happy and find someone with congruent values, I am not interested in being married to those horrible scars.” We expect civilised and frank behaviour, and open and honest acknowledgment of sexual desire, and we expect people to act on same within the rule of law, more or less.  
STEVE: Are my scars horrible?  
TRIXIE: I didn’t even see ‘em. Where are they? [STEVE points out his two scars from being shot]  
ALEX: They are there, but…  
FRY: [very sternly] If it weren’t for the fact that I just told a long story about someone being sexually rejected on the grounds of their scars, I would accuse you of disingenuousness at this point.  
STEVE: Sorry?  
CLARE: Fry means he thinks you are fishing for compliments.  
STEVE: Does he? Do you?  
FRY: Well - I am prepared to entertain the idea that you might have lingering in your mind some anxiety about the ugliness of the scars – but it defies belief that you would be terribly self-conscious about your looks, Steve, doesn’t it? Honestly?  
STEVE: [digests that, puts down beer, stands up, ball rolls away. Revealed as genuinely rather impressive] OK. I thought I was among friends, and here I am, the only one who seems to have been wounded in combat, so I guess I would know how people feel about their war wounds, and whether they are likely to trade on them to impress girls or not. I’ll have my shirt back now thanks. [highly offended. Holds out his hand out to FRY for shirt]  
ALEX: He was just kidding you, Steve! [glares at CLARE]  
FRY: [stands up] You can have your shirt back – and, [while STEVE has hold of the other end of the shirt] I apologise unreservedly for thinking that you were after cheap sympathy from the girls or from me. Also, I meant nothing personal by my choice of example, and so far from thinking ANything about you is horrible, I think you seem, inside and out, perfectly lovely.  
[beat.]  
TRIXIE: Say something mean about me now, Fry, I wanna hear you apologise to me.  
[STEVE gets back into his shirt. ALEX goes to chase down Steve’s bouncy ball and as she moves outside the light she spots the MUSICIAN: he has snuck around, wound up the DVD cord and lifted it off the top, and is fumbling at the remote to turn on the TV preparatory to climbing out through it.]

SCENE 12  
ALEX: Hey!  
CLARE: What are you doing?  
STEVE: He was lifting your DVD player.  
ALEX: But why was he trying to turn on the TV?  
STEVE: Maybe - was it a getaway? Hey [to CLARE] where do you know this guy from?  
CLARE: I don’t know him really. I thought he was the substitute uke player… but … maybe he isn’t.  
STEVE: Right, I said that screen was getting too thin.  
MUSICIAN: I am just going to go.  
TRIXIE: [she has whipped out a little dagger and nipped around behind the MUSICIAN and she holds it comfortably in position] No you ain’t.  
STEVE: Trix, I got it. OK, man, stand up. [he awkwardly does, still holding the DVD player] Put that back. [instantaneous compliance]  
CLARE: [checking mobile] I just found a text from Gus from half an hour ago. He says his guy worked out he wouldn’t make it in time and never left home. I have NO IDEA who that person is.  
STEVE: Whoever he is, my bet is he came through looking for stuff to steal.  
FRY: What were you thinking? […attempting a theft in the presence of all these people]  
MUSICIAN: [clears throat] I was … I was thinking that the conversation was meant to be about why this one – [ALEX] – who is meant to be quite an ordinary sort of person with a birth certificate and a job and possessions - does do a thing or does not do a thing, and then you [FRY] started talking about prose fictions and novels. Why are you not discussing her psychological problems?  
CLARE and ALEX: MY problems!?  
TRIXIE: Don’t let him mess you up girls.  
FRY: [agreeing with TRIXIE] Quite. I think perhaps before we allow this person to engage us in any sort of conversation, we might be justified in asking him to turn out his pockets.  
STEVE: [to MUSICIAN, no need to put any effort into a threat so evidently carry-outable] The easy way or the hard way dude. [Instant though sullen compliance. The candlesticks appear.]  
ALEX: Well! I thought the telly looked wrong! [to MUSICIAN] You rotten bugger! They’re antique, they’re from my two aunties!  
TRIXIE: A thief.  
MUSICIAN: Only sometimes. I AM a singer, really.  
CLARE: No you aren’t ! You’re a horrible pig, is what you are. I gave you a job! We let you play the theme song and you tried to rob us!  
MUSICIAN: But I am really a musician!  
FRY: Why did you take the candlesticks?  
MUSICIAN: They’re silver! I needed the money for rent.  
FRY: Don’t you get government assistance?  
MUSICIAN: Do you know how much the dole is, man? I need more than that to live.  
STEVE: Can’t you get work?  
MUSICIAN: There aren’t enough decent gigs to support me. I am a serious artist: I can’t be playing covers down the RSL.  
CLARE: What’s wrong with the RSL? People want to hear some music there, don’t they? Regular people and older people need singing to as well. If you only want to sing to hipsters so you can look cool you shouldn’t be doing it at all. [to ALEX] Sorry, you take it. [sits]  
ALEX: No problem! [not offended by this minor breach, in the circumstances. Resuming as CLARE] You don’t HAVE to rob people’s houses though! Why don’t you just get a day job?  
MUSICIAN: I can’t fake being interested in the work. I had a day job before, but I hate getting up early, so I got fired. And anyway, I told you: I am an artist. I shouldn’t be wasting my talent behind some shop counter.  
TRIXIE: Plenty of better men than you have been happy enough to stand behind shop counters.  
ALEX: You say you have a musical “talent”.  
MUSICIAN: I do. You all heard me sing. I never even got to practise that stupid Hawaii song, and I was still pretty good.  
STEVE: How is “Near Waikiki” stupid?  
ALEX: A talent is an investment made in you by God, and how you use it should acknowledge that.  
MUSICIAN: What?!  
STEVE: That’s a bit of a reach.  
ALEX: No it isn’t. It is what the parable of the talents means. How is robbing people worthy of your talent?  
MUSICIAN: Hey, I don’t have to be “worthy” to play music. I don’t have a duty to do it, or to do anything else either. I just want to play and so I do. All the people that are interested in playing music but they don’t, because they want to be citizens and go to their boring jobs, that is up to them. And if I steal things sometimes so I can live, well - think of it as a tax, or a public scholarship or something – citizens need artists to make their lives worth living. And - to be clear – my talent belongs to me, it comes from my genes or something, it is mine. My music is about my life and it comes from my heart and my brain and not from some ancient Jewish fairy. [beat for everyone to realised this is God he is talking about]  
FRY: On behalf of Ancient Jewish Fairies everywhere,  
STEVE: How are you ANCIENT?  
FRY: - I’d like to say, I think we have heard enough. I don’t know why anyone with any actual artistic talent would need to cling to a defensive rhetoric about it all coming from their own personal - wonderfulness. I would say “genius”, but then we are just ascribing it to a different fairy, aren’t we?  
MUSICIAN: [to CLARE] Listen, you got your stuff back, didn’t you? Make them turn on the telly and let me go!  
ALEX: Why on earth would we let you go? We should turn you in! Steve is a cop!  
STEVE: I run an elite anti-terrorist unit that reports direct to the governor, but - sure.  
MUSICIAN: You aren’t going to arrest me, are you? I can’t get locked up over this! They will take away my instrument. [this is a genuine horror to him, he starts to look desperate]  
FRY: [looks to CLARE] Rather than risking anyone being injured here, do you think YOU might be able to…?  
CLARE: I’ll try; I don’t know though, he’s got nothing to do with me. OK. [She grabs a pencil and scrawls on the score/script] The MUSICIAN lies down on the stage and goes to sleep. [He does.] Ha!

SCENE 13  
STEVE: What the hell?  
CLARE: [square bracket fingers] The Musician lies down at the side of the stage and goes to sleep. [smug]  
STEVE: Holy Shit. I THOUGHT I was taking my shirt off a lot!  
ALEX: [Seriously??? face] Ah, about the same as usual, I would have said. [High fives CLARE]  
STEVE: [to ALEX, it’s a fair cop] Whatever. Guys: here is the problem – he did attempt a burglary, but I don’t quite know how this will work jurisdictionally. Legally, I think I am from another universe, and I don’t know what the status of my witness testimony will be here. Or Trixie’s. If we can even go outside.  
TRIXIE: I won’t be going to any court. I hate lawyers and I hate jails and I don’t want to be part of sending anyone to rot in one, even him.  
FRY: Neither do I when it comes to it. Gaol is unbeLIEVably awful. And it won’t make him any LESS awful.  
ALEX: I don’t know how real he is either - he might evaporate or something if we take him outside.  
[Now they are all looking at the sleeping MUSICIAN like he is a dead body.]  
TRIXIE: He is just asleep isn’t he?  
CLARE: Trix!! [shaking head, AS IF she would kill him!]  
TRIXIE: You got so angry!  
STEVE: Should I cuff him to something? [belated cop reflex]  
FRY: To what purpose?  
TRIXIE: He can just lie there, as long as he doesn’t snore, can’t he?  
FRY: I wonder why he came through?  
STEVE: Maybe he was fleeing a crime scene - although there aren’t many cop shows about burglaries, are there? I suppose we are lucky he didn’t come through from Criminal Minds.  
ALEX: We’d all be buried in shallow graves in matching wigs if he had been.  
FRY: [to CLARE] You were very upset, weren’t you? That was all fairly conventional “artist” stuff - I mean it isn’t how I see things either, but it’s a point of view, isn’t it?  
CLARE: That everyone else should suffer so you can do your thing.  
FRY: That because of special gifts you have, you intend to do your thing at any cost because to you, practising your art at the highest level is the highest possible good.  
ALEX: I’m with her. He was creeping me out. [CLARE retires]  
FRY: His attempt to distract us was pretty good.  
TRIXIE: Yes! I wanted us to hear about why - folks - shouldn’t be alone. But that wasn’t what you talked about!  
FRY: Clare asked me what she is interested in, and I was answering the question! She is interested in Hawaii 5-0 and she doesn’t really know why! But I think perhaps I do. There is a sickliness to your conventionally romantic girl-boy stories now, where, for the purposes of entertainment, the leads allow their rapprochement to be almost endlessly delayed. Unless the circumstances are bizarre, we expect people to behave reasonably!  
TRIXIE: We expect people in love to use their reason, do we?  
FRY: I think we do. We in the West put a high value on personal happiness, and we expect characters whose stories we are interested in - and people! - to find love and sexual satisfaction and so on, and not to cringe away from delightful experiences and hide in corners.  
ALEX: Fall in love, date, have sex, move in together, marry, have kids, grow old… assemble the elements in your preferred order.  
FRY: All perfectly clear and straightforward and accomplishable with a little hard work and can-do spirit and carefully maintained self-esteem. Straight to the point with as little danger or unnecessary difficulty as possible.  
ALEX: Like an e-harmony ad: “and it’s called: Love.”  
FRY: Yes. I suppose it doesn’t seem terribly romantic does it?  
TRIXIE: But you said there IS a romance in Steve’s show.  
FRY: Well - [finally getting to it] it may be that the reason you enjoy - your alternative plot to Steve’s programme is that there is still a believable element of danger and difficulty about two not-out men being so attached – they can stay suspensefully and romantically stuck, never actually – bringing their story to its inevitable conclusion. Their feelings are evident, but potentially awkward for their friends on the team, so everyone sledges them mercilessly for being a couple, while politely preserving the fiction that it is all a joke.  
STEVE: OK: I sort of see the SUSPENSE part of your Romance - but the SEX between me and Danny part - that is not idealised dude, it is totally IMAGINARY!  
ALEX: But with men - the threat of it - or not a threat - it always seems to be in the background somewhere. Like the way you see young men carrying on with each other – like they are always on the verge of showing their hand that they have a whole nother set of feelings – but whoever speaks first – or acts first – if they get it wrong – they are likely to end up getting bashed.  
TRIXIE: They do carry on like idiots.  
STEVE: How do we “carry on”?  
TRIXIE: [as man] Dude! [punches him, gets him in a headlock, he fights back a little bit, gets her in a headlock without effort, no threat] Get off me you queer! [affectionate tussle, order restored]  
FRY: Of course one hardly EVER does get it wrong, so any real danger one might encounter is likely to be from someone who is seriously disturbed.  
ALEX: Like all those transgendered homophobic psychopaths who are always serial-killing people on American shows.  
STEVE: Or in - what’s that place called - Bradfield!  
FRY: You get Wire in the Blood in fictional-Hawaii, do you?  
STEVE: Oh, I have to have a huge cable package now, so that SOMEONE can record new Game of Throneses.  
FRY: Who would have thought we would ever see a programme more lurid than True Blood? Sorry. Ya. We are all making the same point; aside from psychotic killers who are fantastically rare anyway, even cruising is slowly getting less dangerous. In fact, between the decriminalisation of homosexuality and the rise of the smartphone, the days of those genuinely terrifying - and thrilling - encounters in the men’s loos, when you always had to wonder whether some handsome fellow might wait till you were just about to – oblige him - then announce that he was a cop and/or belt you one – I think those days are numbered really. [STEVE restive] Which is of course a good thing, isn’t it?  
ALEX: At least those encounters were thrilling! Doesn’t the e-harmony thing - not just that site, but the whole setup - seem unbearably banal to anyone else? Everyone subscribing to the neatest possible logistical system which sums them up, and then they pay the computer for the name and phone number of someone to be in love with? Or go on four dates and marry the best one?  
FRY: So Clare: your problem with finding someone to love is that there is TOO LITTLE risk involved for it to be something that would interest you? It seems like a dry and bloodless business without all the danger and difficulty that might make it interesting? Is that why you are a non-combatant?  
ALEX: Oh dear. No. I guess not. [she struggles, then suddenly as ALEX] Actually: you know what: I’m out. [to CLARE] This is your medicine, I think you should come over here and take it yourself.  
CLARE: What?!  
ALEX: Yep, so I just want to say: I’m married. I met my husband through someone else I met on Lavalife like 6 years ago. There was no lack of danger – I was petrified – I was going into it thinking “I haven’t met anyone really right, and if this guy is a dickhead then I am just going to be alone and that is it.” And I didn’t want to be. I needed an ally against the constant hail of shit that is being an actor – I needed to have someone to cook for and go on holidays with and fuck. I didn’t want to be stuck with nothing but my own emotional resources when I am low – and I get pretty low. So I went out with this Christian guy -  
STEVE: Sorry was his NAME Christian or was he A Christian?  
ALEX: A Christian, called Peter, and halfway through the night he says – “seriously you are pretty great, but you aren’t Christian and I really should have said on the thing that it mattered to me. I have been feeling pretty desperate lately so I wanted to go out with you, but talking to you, I see I have made a mistake, and I am so sorry – but it wouldn’t really be right for me to get involved with you when you aren’t a person of faith. – BUT! My flatmate Drew is single too, he is more of a reader like you are, AND he is a full-on Dawkins atheist – would you go out with HIM if I set youse up?” And I said yes, because Peter wasn’t really a bad guy but there was just NO WAY I was ever going to be interested in Jesus – I had a big dose of that at school and I am totally over it – so here was this SECOND date which could have been utterly humiliating – the rejected unchristian girl and the chap who never said he was interested in a girlfriend in the first place.  
TRIXIE: And was it good?  
ALEX: It was awful! I dropped beetroot dip on my front in the first ten minutes and I was ready to cry. I was literally picking up my bag and saying – “Yeah, I think I might just go” – and he was so great. He begged me to stay. He said “it’s good luck when you beetroot yourself, it’s like when a bird craps on you, it means good things are coming your way” and I was looking at him and I could kind of cope all of a sudden.  
So after that, there was plenty of romance, because he was unbelievably sexy to me, AND I felt like I just HAD to be with him, because being with him would fix everything. So there’s your ideal sex thing and your danger. And it did change my life. Ben is a fucking fantastic guy.  
CLARE: [standing up, balefully, having been thrown off] Well, how do you feel now? Now that you have shared your story with everyone, which had nothing to do with anything AND was full of swearing?  
ALEX: Well, I feel great actually! And if you think that story has nothing to do with anything, it is no wonder that you are haven’t gotten yourself organised. I took a chance – two chances actually - and I fucking won.  
CLARE: Nice. [exits through audience door, not to backstage “kitchen”]

SCENE 14  
FRY: Oh dear.  
TRIXIE: Now there is no one to play music at all. [looks at the unconscious musician]  
ALEX: Oh who needs her? Stupid fat ugly cow.  
STEVE: Woah!  
ALEX: No wonder she watches so much TV – she is happier at home on her tod cause she can’t cope with real life.  
TRIXIE: She can cope with Deadwood!  
ALEX: She can cope with it [18’ screen hands] this big.  
STEVE: Size isn’t everything. And – sorry what was your name again? - [looks for name]  
ALEX: Alex.  
STEVE: Right. Like MY actor! Got it. OK – I don’t mean to be personal, but you are pretty hot.  
ALEX: Thanks.  
STEVE: Yeah, but in your story - all that suffering and doubt you were in before you found your guy in those two rolls of the dice: how worried were you really? They must have been all over you when you were single.  
ALEX: Oh yes and no. Not the right ones.  
STEVE: Yeah but plenty of them anyway. Enough to keep your confidence up.  
TRIXIE: Getting fucked a lot by men you don’t like doesn’t necessarily make you more confident.  
ALEX: Steady on, I wouldn’t say “a lot”!  
FRY: I think never having anyone express an interest in you romantically is pretty reliably soul-destroying.  
ALEX: Oh boohoo. You don’t know no-one ever does – she probably knocks them back because they aren’t as ripped as Tim Olyphant! And anyway if they don’t, that is her fault too. She could go on a diet and smarten herself up a bit. [to FRY] You said it – cringeing in the corner! Pathetic!  
TRIXIE: Aren’t you even a bit afraid?  
ALEX: Of what? Of her?  
TRIXIE: What if at the end of my line there is a stage direction that reads, Alex sticks her finger in her own eye as hard as fucking possible? [they all stand up watching Alex anxiously]  
ALEX: I fucking dare her to try it. 

SCENE 15  
CLARE: [yelling from OFF] You know what? I wouldn’t have you back as me if you begged me. You can stand out there for all I care and tell them the exciting story of how you and your guy got a great rate at the function centre where you had your non-religious wedding-slash-reception and how you got the covers for the plastic chairbacks for free because the owner knows your cousin, and see how that goes over. Go on – have a big brag to everyone about your le Creuset casserole dishes, and how brilliant your life is and how you are saving up for a jeep.  
ALEX: How is ANY of that more boring than “extended prose fictions”?  
CLARE: [yelling] Oh I almost forgot! Tell them about your exciting callback for a dog-food ad on Monday!  
ALEX: [yelling back] It’s for CAT food, [this will be a top earner] and my cat might be in it too.  
CLARE: [coming back out in a savage funk, but with her teeth into it] And make sure you rub it right in that you are so happy in love all through your own efforts and bravery and positive thinking and self-esteem and self-discipline and intelligence and resourcefulness, and make sure they get it that LUCK had nothing to do with it.  
STEVE: Come on, she did put herself out there. [furious look from CLARE]  
FRY: Breathe.

SCENE 16  
CLARE: Oh for FUCK’s sake! YOU: Get up and be me. [the MUSICIAN jumps up, picks up the CLARE glasses and goes for it, CLARE retires]  
ALEX: What, now??  
MUSICIAN: [match energy level as exactly as possible] “She put herself out there” - she went out to dinner with someone she pre-interviewed - INEFFECTIVELY!! Her big “win” wasn’t any kind of ACCOMPLISHMENT - it was down to two things, LUCK and MERCY. For it to work, TWO DIFFERENT MEN in quick succession had to be having good days, and with that kind of sense of decency that men have sometimes, instead of writing her off as a dead loss because she is an atheist with no table manners, they demonstrated a bit of imagination and managed to behave beautifully! LUCK – the Christian guy had his flatmate to palm her off onto, and MERCY – this desperate reject covered in dip and bursting into tears after ten minutes, and her date goes to her, “My POOR fellow creature, life is tough, I don’t want you to go home and feel sad because of a stupid bit of beetroot, so I am going to try to cheer you up and then continue to look after you until one of us dies.”  
STEVE: [to ALEX] I don’t know about “decency” – the beets probably just gave him an excuse to look at your chest.  
TRIXIE: Hold on. Men can be animals, sure, but sometimes they can be decent.  
STEVE: Anyone can be decent. Aren’t girls decent? [the girls look at each other]  
TRIXIE: Men will stick to a code. Women are always two steps away from having their backs to the wall: and once they are there, they will just do ANYthing that serves their ends.  
MUSICIAN: Men CAN be very unexpectedly fair-minded about things.  
STEVE: Yeah [perplexed], I don’t want to run down these wonderful fair-minded guys you are talking about, but my guess is, he thought you were hot, he knew you were lonely, and he figured he would score, so it was worth putting in the effort. [to MUSICIAN] In your version he sounds like the nicest guy alive.  
MUSICIAN: He’s going to want to be a saint, because the first minute standing next to him doesn’t make her look good, she’ll be out of there.  
ALEX: [to CLARE] No I WON’t. And HE [MUSICIAN] isn’t even an actor.  
MUSICIAN: [CLARE still clearly talking] Get over it Alex, musicians are usually amazing actors.  
ALEX: But you don’t look anything like her!  
MUSICIAN: [points to glasses] As if you look anything like her either - apart from the hair I suppose - you’re like fifteen years younger and a foot taller for a start! I’ve got the glasses, that’ll have to do. [He sleeks himself down in a gesture that suggests that CLARE is trying him out.]  
FRY: [shudder] Is there any more beer at all out the back? [He is up and getting ready to go himself.]  
MUSICIAN: I’m not sure how much beer was in the fridge.  
STEVE: I want another drink too.  
FRY: I think we should have a look out in the kitchen.  
STEVE: You’re from this universe aren’t you? You might be able to go out to the liquor store.  
FRY: I am not sure – [looks at watch] there might be another me in the gym in England at this moment. But let’s see. Try not to savage each other, please.

SCENE 17  
[Long pause. The girls eye each other.]  
MUSICIAN: [to ALEX] Are you letting it go?  
ALEX: Oh what do I care. [looks around set] What a brothel. [thinks, then to TRIXIE.] Sorry.  
MUSICIAN: This is more visitors than I usually get.  
ALEX: Help me with the bottles anyway.  
[The girls start tidying up. They drag the chairs back onto the set and prepare to sit in a row on the set like old girls at the beach, Alex in the middle. Bouncy balls off to the sides. The MUSICIAN picks up the bottles and Alex fetches a milk crate from the side for them.]  
TRIXIE: [thoughtfully] So: who thinks Fry is out there jerking Steve off? [spit/laugh take from ALEX]  
ALEX: Steve? No WAY.  
MUSICIAN: Why no way?  
ALEX: How OLD is Fry? Also, not handsome, and Steve is all about being fit and hot.  
MUSICIAN: Actually I think Steve is all about positivity and energy – he said Dano was an “energetic guy”, and Fry is probably the most energetic man in the UK.  
ALEX: I hope Danny isn’t within earshot. [because his feelings would be hurt]  
TRIXIE: I wonder if WE are within earshot. [tiny silence]  
ALEX: Are you two really going to sit there and eavesdrop? If they were really doing anything, that would actually be quite pervert - y.  
MUSICIAN: I don’t think you should try to make out I am a pervert.  
ALEX: But you ARE a pervert, because you want to believe that Steve - who is straight anyway - is out there doing it with a man who has to be twenty years older than he is.  
TRIXIE: How straight is he?  
ALEX: You’re as mad as her.  
MUSICIAN: Maybe we should sing something to give them some privacy.  
TRIXIE: Do you two know the song The Cruel War?  
MUSICIAN: That is an oldie.  
ALEX: You start Trix.

TRIXIE: [sings] The cruel war is raging, Johnny has to fight,  
I want to be with him from morning till night.  
I want to be with him, it grieves my heart so,  
Won’t you let me go with you -  
ALEX and MUSICIAN: - no, my love, no!

ALEX: Tomorrow is Sunday, Monday is the day  
When your captain will call you, and you must obey,  
Your captain will call you, it grieves my heart so,  
Won’t you let me go with you?

TRIXIE and MUSICIAN: - no, my love no!  
TRIXIE: I’ll go to your captain, get down on my knees  
ALEX: - I bet -  
TRIXIE: [“bitch” face] And ten thousand gold guineas I’d give for your release,  
Ten thousand gold guineas, it grieves my heart so –  
Won’t you let me go with you?  
MUSICIAN and ALEX: - no my love no. [key change to C]

MUSICIAN: [increasing feeling] I’ll cut off my hair, men’s clothing I’ll put on  
And I’ll pass as your comrade as we march along.  
I’ll pass as your comrade, no one will ever know!  
Won’t you let me go with you?  
ALEX and MUSICIAN: - no my love, no.

TRIXIE: No - that’s wrong! He says yes!  
MUSICIAN and CLARE: Really? [key back to A]  
TRIXIE: I’ll pass as your comrade, no one will ever GUESS!  
Won’t you let me go with you? Yes, my love, yes!

ALEX: Gosh.  
MUSICIAN: How did I learn that wrong?  
TRIXIE: I think that’s what you want, not a romance at all!  
MUSICIAN: What do I want?  
TRIXIE: You would like to be a comrade. Not to be any feller’s wife or girlfriend or whore – you want to be a comrade. You like Steve’s story because his partner is his comrade!  
ALEX: But - Fry went to all that trouble to explain how it was a romance!  
MUSICIAN: He was right, Trix, you should watch it, you’ll see the romance part.  
TRIXIE: And: you know what? she really says “I’ll TIE back my hair”.  
ALEX: Who does, sorry?  
TRIXIE: In the song. “I’ll tie back my hair” not I’ll CUT off my hair. 

I’ll tie back my hair, men’s clothing I’ll put on,  
And I’ll pass as your comrade as we march along.  
TRIXIE, ALEX, MUSICIAN:  
I’ll pass as your comrade, no-one will ever guess,  
Won’t you let me go with you?

SCENE 18  
STEVE: [big shout from backstage, has to sound vaguely orgasmic] Oh YES!  
FRY: [OFF, immediately, groan] Oh my stars!  
TRIXIE: Ha!  
ALEX: Really?  
MUSICIAN: [incredulous delight] No WAY! [they are all frankly listening now, until]  
STEVE [rushing on with FRY, DANO in hand] GUESS what me and Danny and Fry found? [He whips a bottle of champagne out from behind his back with his non-Dano hand.]  
FRY: [almost simultaneously does the same with the other bottle, with Ta-Da! Gesture] Ta-Da!!!  
[The girls are variously amused, vindicated and a bit disappointed:]  
TRIXIE: [amused] Wfff!  
ALEX: Ha!  
MUSICIAN: [disappointed, moue] Tsk.  
STEVE: [their reactions are staggeringly wrong] What the? What did YOU think we were going to find?  
FRY: [after a look at the sheepish girls] I think you will find the question you need to ask is, what did they think we were doing out the back?  
STEVE: [after a moment for the penny to drop] What? The three of us??  
FRY: I think they may have rather left Danny out of their calculations.  
STEVE: What did you think me and Fry were DOing out there exactly?  
TRIXIE: Take your pick.  
ALEX: I didn’t think you were doing anything! I thought you were looking for something to drink!  
STEVE: We only MET an hour ago! [shocked and amused]  
MUSICIAN: [renewed doubt] Oh come on, are you kidding? You, and the man who introduced Jeremy Clarkson to Grindr!  
FRY: Stop it, you wicked girl! Steve was rummaging around in the back –  
MUSICIAN: Really?!  
FRY: FOR WINE! And we found WINE! Here is said WINE! Good LORD . [The girls are finally settling down. They believe FRY. He is not at all distressed but rather pleased to note that] Women really have astoundingly filthy minds. Extraordinary! [the girls are variously convinced.]  
ALEX: Are they cold? [the bottles]  
FRY: They are. They were in the freezer, under a bag of frozen peas.  
STEVE: They were practically iced in, too.  
MUSICIAN: Oh those! I forgot about them!  
TRIXIE: Glasses?  
STEVE: Yes, we had to wash them up. In fact I washed everything up.  
MUSICIAN: Thanks Steve.  
TRIXIE: Get them glasses out. Ready? [All nod, she works the cork out and it pops towards the audience. They pour the champers and drink.]  
ALEX: God champers is the go isn’t it?  
FRY: Now can you explain why you were imagining that we were out the back giving each other a hand, please?  
TRIXIE: Why wouldn’t you be?  
STEVE: That’s one perspective.  
MUSICIAN: If I were either of you, I would want to do it with the other one of you if I thought you would let me.  
FRY: I think there was quite a nice sentiment in there somewhere.  
MUSICIAN: Well, I would. [To FRY] If I were Steve, I would want YOU to think I was beautiful, brave, humane and not an imperialist, and [to STEVE] if I were Fry, I would want you to think me dashing, sexually proficient and generous.  
STEVE: No man has ever thought so many different things about one handjob in the whole history of the world. [staring at the MUSICIAN who is and isn’t a man]  
FRY: Come come now - really? Far be it from me, Steve, to impugn your veracity on this or any other topic –  
STEVE: Noted –  
FRY: but I don’t think that is true at all! When you were a growing boy at least, you must have had the odd tender thought about someone that lasted more than five minutes.  
STEVE: All right.  
FRY: I am quite sure I have wasted ridiculous amounts of time pining after chaps I hardly knew who seemed rather wonderful, speculating about how they might react if I went to - hold their hand. Let alone the hours I must have spent pondering the intentions of some electrifying person who had already – er – been obliging.  
MUSICIAN: But you thinking those thoughts seems charming to me, but me thinking them seems just pathetic. [girly please, not camp.]  
ALEX: It isn’t pathetic to want someone to fancy you and do agreeable things to you.  
MUSICIAN: It is a bit pathetic if they never seem to though.  
ALEX: But how is anyone ever to know that you might want them to if you just want to be a comrade?  
FRY: A Comrade? Did we miss a political discussion while we were out the back imaginarily getting off?  
TRIXIE: No - we solved Clare’s problems while you two were out the back! [glowing at the MUSICIAN]  
FRY: Gosh. How?  
TRIXIE: We decided that she isn’t stuck because she is only interested in romance. It is more that she doesn’t want to be a wife or a whore, she wants to be a comrade.  
ALEX: But can’t a wife can be a good comrade?  
MUSICIAN: Of course they can. And you know what? So can a good whore be. You are, Trix. You shot that bastard Hearst, didn’t you?  
TRIX: I fucking failed to kill him though. I suppose as a whore, you are a comrade of sorts… but most of the time you are more just getting the job done, when you are whoring. It’s hard.  
MUSICIAN: I believe you. And in wife-ing, there is all that quarrelling with each other about washing up and so on. Euggh.  
FRY: I see your jaundice has survived your change of outfit. You know, doing the washing up is quite nice sometimes.  
STEVE: It’s better than getting cholera anyway.  
FRY: [to STEVE, of the champers] Finish it off, Steve, go on.  
STEVE: [after first swig] Dan’s on the wagon tonite, so I don’t mind if I do. [He does.] Guys - do you see the problem with this comrade-ing business that everyone is so keen on?  
TRIXIE: What?  
STEVE: Well - you all know that guys don’t really fuck their comrades, right?  
MUSICIAN: Never? [Wistful] Really?  
FRY: REALLY, Steve?  
STEVE: [Long, long pause, to give them time to absorb this] Really. They just - don’t.  
FRY: But – not to be pushy, but you and whatshername -  
STEVE: Lt Rollins?  
FRY: You two do actually…  
STEVE: Yeah, of course! [thinking that is a rude question, not seeing where this is going at all]  
FRY: Well, isn’t the lieutenant your comrade, Steve?  
STEVE: I guess so. [laughs] I… I guess she is, so I guess you do. Fuck, whaddaya know? I guess I was thinking of my old unit, and there was no-one I was going to fuck in Seal Team 9.  
ALEX: Probably because there were NO GIRLS in your old team, right?  
STEVE: No, there were no girls in Seal Team 9.  
FRY: So, [to TRIXIE] dear lady: do you feel that you have done what you came to do?  
MUSICIAN: What you came to do? What does he mean? I thought you came to try the Galliano!  
FRY: Good grief! One drink and I am saying the wrong thing.  
TRIXIE: It’s all right. Girl, I didn’t just come to drink your liquor. Don’t get angry! I could see you here, all on your own, and I wanted to come and see if I could help you out.  
MUSICIAN: Help me out with what?  
TRIXIE: I thought you looked awful lonesome.  
MUSICIAN: Really. [to a slightly conscious looking STEVE] And did you have any particular issues that you wanted to raise?  
STEVE: I didn’t, but…  
MUSICIAN: But what?  
STEVE: Danny saw that the others got through, and he just wanted to come and check up on you…  
MUSICIAN: Wait. [incredulous] DANO wanted to check up on me.  
STEVE: He was worried about you having no partner, too. And he thought maybe he should talk to you about your - [looks at CLARE nervously] about being a bit more active.  
MUSICIAN: Oh fantastic! Right! I am sure we’ll have lots of time to get into that world of excitement later, but - can I ask if there was any particular agenda behind your visit?  
FRY: I told you at once that I had come to assist you, remember?  
MUSICIAN: So this is what? An intervention?! [horror] To stop me sitting at home watching TV by myself? [CLARE is also on her feet]  
STEVE: Not the conspiracy kind! We didn’t know the others were coming till Dan saw Trixie coming through! And why would any of US want to stop you watching TV?!  
FRY: We have to make a living, after all.  
ALEX: You have to be making a pretty stupendous “living” these days!  
FRY: Alex: I have no complaints - and I don’t just mean about money. By some miracle, I have managed to find a mass audience of people who like listening to comedians arguing about how many natural satellites the earth has, or like watching me smile at Alan Davies, and I won’t be eroding that miracle by a single instance if I can help it. However - Clare - when I heard Steve and Trixie having a go at you about being here all by yourself all the time -  
MUSICIAN: It isn’t all the time! Really! I go out!  
FRY: If you would stop talking and pay attention - I thought it sounded like they had you cornered about the wrong thing entirely. I am sure that you WOULD like to be a comrade and so on, because you are not really a pervert, although you are perhaps a little despondent about these things -  
MUSICIAN: Well, it would be nice, I suppose. But so would winning the lottery and finding I had telekinetic powers and lots of other things!  
FRY: Yes – leaving aside the telekinetic powers, which might be rather tricky – I am interested in the “other things”, because I think Trixie and Steve are rather barking up the wrong tree. I want to ask you what else it is that YOU think you ought to be doing of an evening. Excuse me. [to CLARE] May I speak directly to you?  
CLARE: I suppose so.  
MUSICIAN: I feel funny.  
FRY: I am sorry, but you had better stop working this fellow as soon as possible. I know you didn’t want him here and that we both dislike his opinions, but really, it can’t be altogether good for you to have so much power over anyone.  
MUSICIAN: OK now I am feeling really funny. [funny seems to include exhaustion to the point of nausea]  
CLARE: Do you know, I think you might be right. Having another me might be getting addictive. I should just turn him off, I suppose.  
[They all remember they don’t like the MUSICIAN, as he drops his head and becomes completely passive.]

SCENE 19  
TRIXIE: Oh it is horrible when you turn him off!  
ALEX: Why didn’t he go back to being the musician guy? He is just sort of nothing.  
STEVE: He is a little bit like a zombie. [unconsciously shifting away]  
TRIXIE: Don’t just leave him there Steve, help me sit him down at least. [they do this, while]  
CLARE: I think I can make him sing at the end. That would be good, actually. He sang at the start.  
FRY: You should probably pay him something if he does.  
CLARE: Pay him! For his lying and robbing?  
FRY: No, for his playing and singing, which was rather good! In fact: I am going to ask you something about him singing if you don’t mind.  
CLARE: Oh dear. Why do I feel a sort of sick dread?  
FRY: Why indeed? Your horror of anything like a personal question can’t exactly be speeding up your progress through life’s difficulties, can it? And I hope you remember that I came to help you, not to attack you.  
CLARE: All right. Ask away.  
FRY: Well: I know that you can, in fact, sing yourself.  
ALEX: You did sound all right on the recording, you know.  
CLARE: So?  
FRY: SO: you were most unhappy when he said he was a singer.  
CLARE: Because he isn’t a singer is he? He is a thief who was only pretending to be one.  
TRIXIE: Not much of a thief. He was a much better singer!  
CLARE: I was playing with that guy, - he was singing the theme song of our show - and he wasn’t taking it seriously. He betrayed me – us all!  
FRY: Like Alex betrayed you?  
CLARE: Well, you did a bit. I thought you were going to do the me part, and you just left me with it.  
FRY: I could be wrong but I think she thought letting you sit off to the side looking smug while she took it in the neck about being a lonely pervert was a bit beyond the pale.  
CLARE: I am not a pervert! Or if I am, I am probably exactly as much of a pervert as EVERYBODY else is. And I am not particularly lonely either girls! I know you think everyone should get married or be respectable -  
TRIXIE: I don’t care about those things at all! - I want you to know that everything changes when you find someone who loves you! Clare - [CLARE has to play for her].

TRIXIE: [sings] Everything changes -  
ALEX: it all changes -  
TRIX & ALEX: when the right one is there!  
TRIXIE: Night into morning -  
ALEX: brilliant morning -  
TRIX & ALEX: when you’re allowed to care!  
ALEX: You’re always holding on -  
TRIXIE: holding on tightly -  
TRIX & ALEX: trying not to mind.  
ALEX: Somewhere you're waiting for  
TRIXIE: waiting for someone  
TRIX & ALEX: someone brave and kind…  
TRIXIE: I can’t explain -  
ALEX: we can’t explain it -  
TRIX & ALEX: words are not the way:  
When you’re alone, then not alone  
You see it all in a different light  
Like night and day.

ALEX: It is just too hard on your own.  
CLARE: Hard compared to what?  
ALEX: To being with someone!  
CLARE: Oh come on, being with someone is hard work too! Listen: you are all so worried about loneliness! - It is just a feeling you know. Loneliness isn’t like a brain tumour, where even if you don’t know you have it, it can be killing you. If you aren’t feeling it, or worrying about it, it isn’t there! It is like when your mum says, “you must be cold!” - if you are generally pretty healthy and you aren’t FEELING cold, you aren’t cold! And even if you do feel a bit cold occasionally - like in winter - well you aren’t going to suddenly move to Far North Queensland or sew yourself into your pyjamas in a panic, are you?  
I try to pay my own way guys. I don’t have to put up with anything stupid or lame if it gets in the way of what I am interested in. I play my cues, and then if I want to I can come back to my flat and watch a bit of telly and eat my dinner and I think that is MY CHOICE.  
FRY: But what are you interested in? DO you just want to go back to your flat by yourself? Really?  
CLARE: OK. I don’t want to talk about this any more.  
FRY: About what?  
CLARE: Any of it. You may as well all go back where you came from.  
FRY: Not so fast. We aren’t going anywhere. [they are getting somewhere]  
CLARE: You’re all pretty cool, aren’t you! I knocked him out with a single line. What makes you think I won’t do the same to you?  
FRY: Really?  
STEVE: You want to make me a zombie?  
TRIXIE: I don’t believe you honey. You couldn’t be so foolish.  
CLARE: [contrition] No of course not. That was a terrible thing to say. And I would never have poked you in the eye with your own finger either Alex. Thank you for trying.  
ALEX: It’s OK. Sorry about - the other thing I said.  
FRY: You see - I think we already know what your problem is with the poor old zombie here. When he is himself, he does without the comforts of being a reasonable, proper, moral, hardworking person.  
STEVE: A “citizen”.  
FRY: Yes, he does without being a citizen, but he seems to be perfectly satisfied with his life as an arrogant, burglarizing, ukulele-playing singing artist, as long as he is getting away with it.  
ALEX: You forgot “horribly-dressed”. Look at that shirt.  
CLARE: Being a proper moral reasonable person is not a comfort.  
FRY: Isn’t it?  
CLARE: It is HARD being a proper moral reasonable person! I have been trying forever and ever and the longer I try the harder it gets!  
ALEX: Maybe that is because you really aren’t one at all! Maybe you are really an awful horrible artist, and you should just be that!  
FRY: [to CLARE] As if you can’t be a citizen AND an artist! And we know you believe you have a duty to GOD to use any talents he has invested in you.  
CLARE: Aren’t you an atheist?  
FRY: My beliefs are not up for discussion.  
TRIXIE: Don’t get sore.  
CLARE: Why wouldn’t I be - angry? All of you with your opinions about what I ought to want! My life is perfectly sensible - surely there is no EARTHLY reason why at my age, instead of living a nice quiet life, I should start trying to drag myself around tiny indy venues trying to convince groovy young people that it isn’t riDICulous for them to have to listen to me sing whatever self-indulgent crepe I make up. Why, why in the name of all that is holy would I put myself in the position of standing out there in front of a pub crowd trying to persuade people that they should listen to an old girl who looks like their Aunty Judy?  
FRY: Do you remember when I was young and I was General Melchitt? With Captain Darling?  
CLARE: [immediate softening] Of course I do.  
FRY: Do you remember when I had the show with Hugh, and at the end he used to play the piano and I would make those surrealist cocktails in the shaker?  
CLARE: Yes. It almost makes me cry to think about that, in fact.  
FRY: Tears of gratitude, those would be.  
CLARE: Yes they would be I suppose.  
FRY: So you owe me a debt of gratitude. A great debt, wouldn’t you say?  
CLARE: Yes.  
TRIXIE: I have seen you crying at my story. You owe me too.  
CLARE: What do you want?  
FRY: I want you to put yourself in the position of standing out there in front of a pub crowd and explaining to people why they should listen to the singing of an old girl who looks like you. And I want you to do it right now.  
TRIXIE: I do too.  
ALEX: Listen, I know you don’t owe me anything -  
CLARE: You got that right, you piker -  
ALEX: But I kind of want to hear you sing.  
STEVE: Dano wants to hear what you sound like!  
CLARE: All right. [composes herself] All right. It can be called “Vampire Song”.

SCENE 20 (song)  
Hello, thank you for coming out tonight from your firesides, and for your interest in “emerging new talent”, in “new sounds” and “new voices”- I know the new voices usually emerge from someone lovely and interesting and twenty-odd years old, but tonite, you get me - I who when I was young, used to merrily say that I couldn’t see why I would want to live beyond sixty, exhausted and aching and poor, until I noticed that I was struggling for years on end with apparently simple questions, like “is this fun?” or “should I be trying to have sex with this fellow?” or “am I in the right line of work?”

I was like a fool who instead of sniffing old milk, going blecchhh and chucking it out, would hold my nose and keep drinking it all the way to the bottom of the carton trying to think about whether it was sweet or slightly off or a slurry of proto-yoghurt that would make a pig gag… 

And I used to think that vampires were symbolic Lesbian Gay Bi Transsexual Intersex people, because they got to live outside the structure of family life and satisfy their appetites no matter what, but now I am wondering if vampires are only what all artists really need to be in the end, because when it comes to understanding anything about myself or this everchanging world in which we live in, at my current rate of progress I might need to live for about three hundred years, and even then, the amount of time being a citizen takes up - it’s just too much, and it will only be possible to make any kind of headway by adopting a lifestyle where I survive by ruthlessly rending the raw materials of life from a sequence of outraged but hapless victims, leaving me free to pursue life’s problems to something like solutions.... 

And it’s like I am playing a lifelong game of “celebrity head” or in my version “two million and twenty questions” where although I am fairly sure that the name on my head is MY OWN, all of the useful questions have been deemed impolite and illegal, so instead of “are you a man or a woman?” I’m stuck with questions like “did you play with a GI Joe when you were little?” which really don’t help me to determine who I am meant to be in any way shape or form.

And it seems that there’s a bias somewhere in my nature that steers me away from those things that other people see as self-evidently necessary or satisfying and towards things which are merely entertaining, and maybe it’s because really I think “Satisfaction” is exactly as much of a chimera as “Happiness” - but the funny thing is that despite my off-milk-drinking, unhelpful-question-asking, citizen-being process for getting through life I feel like I HAVE THAT ONE ALREADY - that’s happiness I mean: not satisfaction, which is probably out given that I am playing a three-hundred-year-long game at which I will be lucky to get thirty more years’ worth of turns; and then again, maybe life’s great problems are not to be solved in solitary reflection but in complex and ethical and passionate engagement with others - which I think sounds exhausting - so maybe my role is to provide some light relief which brings me back to entertainment: and given our limited human lifespans - well if our ship is going down and we are sliding into the freezing black water to die, then why not devote our last moments to singing a beautiful hymn? So now we all know where we stand, and thank you for listening to my song. 

SCENE 21  
STEVE: [baffled] That wasn’t a real song was it?  
CLARE: Thanks Steve! [she avails herself of the not-empty champagne and has a swig]  
ALEX: [profound reservations] It was OK - sort of a bit like Tim Minchin. Not as funny, obviously.  
CLARE: No, obviously.  
TRIXIE: It reminded me of “You Bloody Motherfucking Asshole” by Martha Wainwright.  
CLARE: OK, thank you very much Trixie, I really admire that song.  
FRY: I think you’ve hung lanterns there on most of the obvious peculiarities of your situation and if singing that as an intro would allow you then to get on with it, then I think that would do perfectly well. I think you have a few new options to be going on with now.  
CLARE: I probably should go out and sing some of my own songs somewhere I suppose. [to STEVE] You really didn’t like it, did you?  
STEVE: It is hard for me to say - it was so unexpected. [he whispers to ALEX under the next two lines]  
CLARE: I guess so. There would be some baffled-looking guys out there if I got up and sang that in a pub somewhere. [laughs]  
TRIXIE: But maybe some that ain’t baffled too. You do it.  
FRY: There are no laws against baffling people, as far as I know.  
ALEX: [shocked laugh] STEVE!  
STEVE: What? What is wrong with that? She is a good singer isn’t she?  
CLARE: Who?  
ALEX: I asked him what he was expecting you to sound like and he said, “like that eyebrow lady.”  
FRY: Oh Steve!  
CLARE: [getting it] LIKE SUSAN BOYLE???  
STEVE: But she’s good isn’t she? She’s famous! She was in Les Mis, right?  
ALEX: No Steve, she really wasn’t.  
CLARE: So Steve: what did Dan have to say about the singing?  
STEVE: I am afraid to tell, in case everyone starts yelling at me again.  
CLARE: Go on.  
STEVE: He said there isn’t a singer-songwriter in the world who isn’t still attempting to make sense of Dylan’s legacy.  
CLARE: Wow.  
ALEX: That is kind of profound.  
FRY: It could be taken as an artful critical sidestep.  
CLARE: Yes, it could, but I am less pissed off than before. And Dan: I promise to go for a long active walk to think about that. There you go.  
FRY : Well, I think my work here is done. My attempt at playing the magical fairy godfather has turned into a complete fiasco.  
CLARE: No it hasn’t! That was kind of fun! Except for the part where I got forced to disembowel myself on stage, and Steve got to sit there and say that I remind him of Susan Boyle singing “Wild Horses.”  
STEVE: Hey! Don’t MAKE UP things I didn’t say!  
CLARE: All right.  
STEVE: But - we did kind of force you to sing that long, weird song about your inconclusive thought processes or something - and maybe I didn’t understand it… but you did it!  
FRY: Steve: are YOU about to sing?  
STEVE: I guess I am. Look - I can’t tell you an outrageous story of forbidden love about me and Dan because there isn’t one to tell! We just drive around bitching at each other all day at work - and we go surfing and watch TV and run… but… ANYWAY: I want to say - when Cathy’s ship is away for months and months, I am more than capable of going into a nice conventional bar and just hitting on someone and getting it on, all very pleasant, and I kind of pre-explain that I am kind of with an officer who is on active duty and is posted all over the shop, so if the person is really only interested in a binding lifelong contract, you know, they can say no and take themselves off…  
TRIXIE: “They…” “someone…” “a person…”  
ALEX: Trix wants to know if “they” have a GENDER.  
STEVE: Trix, almost EVeryone turns out to have an agenda. [yuk yuk] Well … there is … kind of another option.  
ALEX: I don’t believe it.  
TRIXIE: I do.  
CLARE: Go on.  
STEVE: Well in England where it sleets and it is completely horrible, I guess public bathrooms are the best anyone can hope for... But in fictional-Hawaii, we have beaches where it is very dark – volcanic black sand, you know - and at night a couple of those beaches have a bit of a reputation, and I am not saying I have done this OFTEN, but, don’t you think it would be a pretty amazing thing to go down for a walk on that beach in the evening, and if you just go home after a night walk on the beach, that is nice too, but you might meet someone and…  
FRY: Ye-es…  
STEVE: and it is pretty dangerous, in a few different ways – like you never know who you might see, and it might be some asshole who works for the DA, or some criminal you have arrested, and there you are, potentially in a serious jam. And it probably isn’t worth the risk. It is probably stupid ever, ever to go there.  
CLARE: But what a way to exercise your liberty! [various groans] I’m serious.  
FRY: The ‘liberty’ to collide anonymously and probably illegally - [checking with Steve]  
STEVE: There’s an Open Lewdness offence but it’s never invoked -  
FRY: - outside, and in the dark? What a bizarre idea of freedom you have!  
CLARE: To meet and to know that the other person is also risking something to be there – that makes you comrades without a word being spoken. And you only feel your freedom when you are testing it, when you are doing what you want and not whatever it is you are supposed to be doing. – And at the black sand beach, there can be no possible talk of Valentine’s Day Balloon arrangements or other rubbish designed to drive girls insane.  
ALEX: Listen: Clare - I do know what you mean about the insane-making stuff. But - the danger is there no matter how people get into it, isn’t there? The penalty for showing your hand if you like someone doesn’t really have to be DEATH or disgrace for it to be dangerous. You FEEL like you are risking death anyway.  
CLARE: Now tell us Steve – does Danny know about the black sand beach?  
FRY: Oh for God’s sake!  
TRIX: Do you ever give up?  
ALEX: What is WRONG with you?  
STEVE: [laughing] I could be wrong, but I don’t think we ever mentioned it before. [listens] If you don’t stop laughing I can’t understand you. [he puts his ear close to Dano] Ow! [rubs head] What? [laughs] Asshole.  
FRY: What did he say?  
STEVE: [to FRY, embarrassed] Don’t take this the wrong way, OK? He says, “that’s for being a queer” [everyone’s face says, So Dano is kind of a homophobe] and he says… [listens] Oh for…  
CLARE: WHAT??  
STEVE: He says that I am never allowed out at night unsupervised again, and from now on he is going to sit there right next to me on the couch watching me while I watch TV, and he is going to ask me every five minutes if I am having any inappropriate sexual thoughts about any hot guys in the shows. Seriously, I am never going to hear the end of this – what have I done?  
ALEX: [to CLARE] You find these two IDiots watchable?  
CLARE: I find them kind of romantic, what can I tell you?  
FRY: Quite the domestic idyll, I would have said.  
ALEX: I am exhausted.  
CLARE: Let’s have a Deadwood mini-marathon! Just the first three eps, so he can monitor you watching Tim Olyphant building the store!  
TRIXIE: But - I can’t watch it in front of everybody!  
CLARE: Trixie my darling, if you think you are going to get to sit here quietly and watch TV by yourself after all that you are nuts.  
FRY: Don’t forget about the poor musician!  
CLARE: Oh right! Sorry.  
FRY: I actually thought ASKING him to sing again was a nice idea.  
CLARE: Whatever you think best, Stephen.

SCENE 22  
[Alex gets the DVD plugged back in and sets TRIXIE up with the remote. The TV is turned on. CLARE gets the MUSICIAN on his feet.]  
CLARE: Oy you. [MUSICIAN wakes] Time to sing.  
MUSICIAN: Oh. What are you all doing? [he doesn’t seem to remember being CLARE, and he has “just woke up” fog]  
CLARE: Watching a DVD. But they - we - want you to sing first.  
MUSICIAN: [putting his hand up to his face to find he is wearing glasses] I feel really, really strange.  
CLARE: Yeahhh.  
MUSICIAN: I feel - I don’t know - not sad - kind of lonely. Why is that?  
CLARE: [guiltily] I have no idea. Lonely but good, right?  
MUSICIAN: Did you do something to me? Why was I unconscious?  
CLARE: You’ll be fine! You know that song you sang at the beginning – could you sing the last verse for us?  
MUSICIAN: Sing it yourself, you fucking witch! [he runs and jumps out through the TV.]

SCENE 23  
CLARE: NOOOOOOoooooo! [shock all round] He went into Deadwood! Oh my god!  
ALEX: That is quite the punishment for trying to steal two candlesticks and a DVD player.  
TRIXIE: We are starting at the beginning, aren’t we - we might see where he went!  
FRY: Try and look out for him if you see him later, won’t you?  
TRIXIE: I will. If he’s still alive at the end of three episodes.  
ALEX: Do the honours Trix!  
TRIXIE: I just press this button [on the remote] and it starts up.  
TRIXIE: Right. [She presses the start button and hears the Deadwood music, not boomingly loud. After a second of the violin tune she jumps out of the chair and puts her hand on the TV.] OH! [She is feeling the rush you feel from the music of your favourite TV show times a hundred.] Oh! That is what that music is! I never… Oh! Oh Sol, there you are! Before I ever saw you! Oh you look so serious. Don’t be scared Sol. I am a lucky, lucky girl ain’t I.  
Alex takes TRIXIE’s hand and gets her back in her chair, and they all settle in to watch.

TV sound fades, CLARE gets up to sing.

CLARE: [little uke intro, then]  
Who knows if we will meet again  
Near Old Waikiki-town?  
But be assured, you have a friend  
Who’ll never let you down!  
Though you must sail the ocean blue  
I’ll walk alone and dream of you,  
You came to me beside the sea  
Near Waikiki.

Lights out.

THE END

 

CUE REFERENCES etc:  
Deadwood opening title music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B909njPoX7k  
Sol’s first scene http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TfG2r9TVuA 3.05  
A little fan montage about Trixie, set to the Martha Wainwright song mentioned in the play: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnB_WFcyuJ  
The audio clip from QI used at the beginning was from ep A02 and featured this quote: [on being informed that the Earth has a second moon called Cruithne]: Alan Davies: But it does have one moon. It's called THE MOON!

**Author's Note:**

> If you got all this way, whoever ye be - thank you thank you for reading! DOOO let me know if you could make any sense of it in a quick comment! I also wrote most of the songs - and (obviously?) played CLARE in the show. Someone had to play the piano, and though I can't really act at all, I can sing all right! And btw - my Gert pic is of the real Dano from the play!! xx


End file.
